The major work on which the reputation of the
great French poet François VILLON chiefly rests is
his 2,000-line poem Testament. The poem, written
(we are told in its first lines) in 1461 when the poet
was 30 years old, comprises 186 eight-line stanzas,
into which Villon has inserted several short fixedform
lyrics including 16 BALLADES, two RONDEAUX,
and a chanson. Essentially the poem purports to be
a last will and testament, in which Villon’s primary
purpose is to bequeath his possessions to his
friends and acquaintances before what he suggests
may be his imminent death.
Immediately prior to his composition of the
Testament, Villon had been arrested and imprisoned
at Meung on the orders of Thibaud d’Aussigny,
bishop of Orléans. He was released from
imprisonment by order of King Louis XI in 1461.
Accordingly, Villon begins the poem with a bitter
invective against the bishop, praying that God will
do to the bishop what the bishop has done to Villon.
This is followed by praise for the king who
freed him, and from here moves to a consideration
of what he has learned through his suffering.
Although he is a sinner,Villon tells us, God desires
his conversion and reformation, not his death.
In several stanzas, Villon laments his lost youth
and blames his poverty for forcing him into a life
of crime.He includes an anecdote about Alexander
and a Pirate, in which the Pirate tells Alexander
that he is a criminal because he has only one
ship—if he had a fleet, he would be an emperor.
From here,Villon moves to a lament on the impermanence
of worldly things—in particular Villon
bemoans the transience of beauty, particularly in
the deaths of beautiful women, and inserts his famous
“Ballade des dames du temps jadis” (“Ballade
of the Ladies of Bygone Days”), which
includes the famous refrain most often translated
“Where are the snows of yesteryear?”
Villon goes on to consider the ravages of age on
both men and women, and includes another ballade
in the voice of an old woman advising young
ones to make the most of their youth. But Villon
continues to focus on women in general, and then
on women’s love, inserting a double ballade on the
unfortunate consequences of love. Ultimately he
repudiates love itself, giving it up forever.
Now considering his own broken body, Villon
returns to his tirade against the bishop of Orléans,
and curses the bishop as he describes the tortures
to which he was subjected in Meung. Finally,Villon
moves on to the bequests that make up the testament.
He begins by bequeathing his soul to God
and his body to the earth, then moves on to his father,
to whom he leaves his books. He has nothing
to give his mother except a prayer for her to recite
to the Virgin, which he includes as a ballade. He
follows these with a variety of other bequests, some
somewhat serious in the form of individual lyric
poems, some outlandish, some apparently based
on topical or private references that are incomprehensible
to us.
Villon moves on to a discussion of Parisian
women, and includes a well-known and graphically
ribald ballade about “Fat Margot” and her
sexual appetite. Ultimately, he makes some requests
about his burial; forgoing any appeal for a
tomb, he writes a verse for his own epitaph, asking
for eternal rest after a life of hard knocks. He then
names his executors—rich men with whom he was
never acquainted—and adds a ballade in which he
pardons everyone he can think of, including
whores and swindlers and fools, but denies his pardon
to those who made his life difficult—for them,
he wishes a hammer would crush their ribs.
Overall, the Testament shows a technical mastery
of form and meter. However, its overall structure
seems formless: As the above summary shows,
the poem is organized around an association of
ideas and images rather than by any logical progression.
Villon focuses repeatedly on the transience
of earthly things, and employs the
traditional ubi sunt (“Where are they?”) topos of
classical literature: Where are the years of my
youth, he asks? Where are the beautiful women
gone? Where are my old companions? Where, indeed,
are the snows of yesteryear? But Villon, a
master of many styles, also includes mocking satire
in his repeated attacks on those who he believes
have wronged him in life.What makes the Testament
a classic of medieval French poetry is its variety
of language, style, and tone, moving from the
somber to the satirical, from the moving to the
mocking, sometimes within the same stanza. The
poem has made Villon one of the most admired
poets in the French language.
Bibliography
Burl, Aubrey. Danse Macabre: François Villon, Poetry,
& Murder in Medieval France. Stroud, Gloucestershire,
U.K.: Sutton, 2000.
Fein, David. François Villon Revisited. New York:
Twayne, 1997.
Sargent-Baur, Barbara N. Brothers of Dragons: Job
Dolens and François Villon. New York: Garland,
1990.
Taylor, Jane H. M. The Poetry of François Villon: Text
and Context. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 2001.
Villon, François. Complete Poems. Edited with English
translations and commentary by Barbara N. Sargent-
Baur. Toronto: Toronto University Press,
1994.